From a young age, Lukas Quinn’s life has centered around sports — playing them, following them and rooting for his favorite teams, the New York Giants and Syracuse University athletics. “He’s a real sports nut,” his mother Juli says with a laugh.

For the first seven years of his life, Lukas was a bundle of energy, active and playing sports without any health issues. So when Juli received a phone call from Lukas’s summer camp, explaining that he was locked in a bathroom with severe gastrointestinal issues, she was worried. “Lukas would not come out of the bathroom until I got there,” says Juli. “It was scary to see him in such distress.”

Little did the Quinns know that Lukas would soon be diagnosed with a medical condition that made him predisposed to develop cancer. And after a series of genetic tests, they would learn that his father and sister had the same condition. …

It’s a situation few parents ever imagine during a healthy pregnancy. Yet there Laura and Jared Maxwell were, waiting anxiously in the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital as their infant daughter, Reagan, under went a barrage of tests. After their little girl had been born with a congenital anomaly just a few weeks earlier, physicians wanted to make sure that she didn’t have other related genetic syndromes that could affect her heart, kidneys and other organs. “It was one of the most terrifying days of my life,” recalls Laura. …

It began as a fun, relaxing trip. In 2016, the Alwosaifers were visiting Massachusetts from their home country of Saudi Arabia. It should have been an idyllic summer vacation — but then their youngest child, Faysal, got sick. What started as a stomachache soon worsened until the 12-year-old collapsed with severe abdominal pain. …

Most parents dress their baby girls in headbands for fun. But for Addison Quandt, these accessories, adorned with bows and flowers, weren’t a frivolous fashion statement. Instead, they helped hold in place the gauze that covered a large hemangioma on the back of her neck. “People always said what a fashionable baby she was,” says her mom, Dianne. “If they only knew.” …